Ferment Over 'The Israel Lobby'
MichaelP
The Nation May 15, 2006 issue posted April 27, 2006 (May 15, 2006 issue)
Ferment Over 'The Israel Lobby'
PHILIP WEISS
* Philip Weiss is the author of American Taboo: A Murder in the
Peace Corps (Harper Perennial).
Intellectuals can only dream of having the impact that John Mearsheimer
and Stephen Walt have had this spring. Within hours of their publishing a
critique of the Israel lobby in The London Review of Books for March 23,
the article was zinging around the world, soon to show up on the front
pages of newspapers and stir heated discussion on cable-TV shows.
Virtually overnight, two balding professors in their 50s had become public
intellectuals, ducking hundreds of e-mails, phone messages and challenges
to debate.
Titled "The Israel Lobby," the piece argued that a wide-ranging coalition
that includes neoconservatives, Christian Zionists, leading journalists
and of course the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC,
exerts a "stranglehold" on Middle East policy and public debate on the
issue. While supporting the moral cause for the existence of Israel, the
authors said there was neither a strategic nor a moral interest in
America's siding so strongly with post-occupation Israel. Many Americans
thought the Iraq War was about oil, but "the war was motivated in good
part by a desire to make Israel more secure."
The shock waves from the article continue to resonate. The initial
response was outrage from Israel supporters, some likening the authors to
neo-Nazis. The Anti-Defamation League called the paper "a classical
conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power
and Jewish control." University of Chicago Professor Daniel Drezner
called it "piss-poor, monocausal social science." Harvard Law Professor
Alan Dershowitz said the men had "destroyed their professional
reputations." Even left-leaning critics dismissed the piece as
inflammatory and wrong. As time passed (and the Ku Klux Klan remained
dormant), a more rational debate began. The New York Times, having first
downplayed the article, printed a long op-ed by historian Tony Judt saying
that out of fear, the mainstream media were failing to face important
ideas the article had put forward. And Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin
Powell's former chief of staff, praised it at the Middle East Institute
for conveying "blinding flashes of the obvious," ideas "that were
whispered in corners rather than said out loud at cocktail parties where
someone else could hear you."
While criticisms of the lobby have circulated widely for years and been
published at the periphery, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper stands out because
it was so frontal and pointed, and because it was published online by
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where Walt is a professor and
outgoing academic dean. "It was inevitably going to take someone from
Harvard [to get this discussed]," says Phyllis Bennis, a writer on Middle
East issues at the Institute for Policy Studies.
What's more, the article appeared when public pessimism over the Iraq War
was reaching new highs. "The paper was important as a political
intervention because the authors are squarely in the mainstream of
academic life," says Norman Finkelstein, a professor of political science
at DePaul University dedicated to bringing the issue of Palestinian
suffering under the occupation to Americans' attention. "The reason
they're getting a hearing now is because of the Iraq debacle." Bennis and
Finkelstein, both left-wing critics of Israel, have criticisms of the
paper's findings. Partly this reflects the paper's origins: Though it was
printed in a left-leaning English journal, it was written by theorists of
a school associated with the center/right: realism, which holds that the
world is a dangerous neighborhood, that good intentions don't mean very
much and that the key to order is a balance of power among armed states.
For realists, issues like human rights and how states treat minorities are
so much idealistic fluff.
Let's begin with the personalities. The more forceful member of the duo
(and the one who would talk to me), Mearsheimer, 58, is by nature an
outsider. Though he spent ten years of his youth in the military,
graduating from West Point, he wasn't much for tents and guns even as he
latched on to David Halberstam's book The Best and the Brightest because
it explained a horrible war. Out of pure intellectual curiosity
Mearsheimer, who had become an officer in the Air Force, enrolled in
graduate school classes at the University of Southern California. Today
he is a realist powerhouse at the University of Chicago, publishing such
titles as Conventional Deterrence. Like Mearsheimer, Walt, 50, grew up in
privilege, but he is a courtly and soft-spoken achiever. Stanford,
Berkeley and Princeton figured in his progress to Harvard. "I think Steve
enjoyed moving into institutional roles," says one academic. "Steve likes
a good argument, but unlike John he can be polite. John enjoys the image
of the bomb thrower."
Mearsheimer was hawkish about Israel until the 1990s, when he began to
read Israel's "New Historians," a group of Israeli scholars and
journalists (among them Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and Tom Segev) who showed
that Israel's founders had been at times ruthless toward Palestinians.
Mearsheimer's former student Michael Desch, a professor at Texas A&M,
recalls the epiphany: "For a lot of us, who didn't know a lot about the
Israel/Palestine conflict beyond the conventional wisdom and Leon Uris's
Exodus, we saw a cold war ally; and the moral issue and the common
democracy reinforced a strong pro-Israel bent." Then Desch rode to a
conference with two left-wing Jewish academics familiar with the New
Historians. "My initial reaction was the same as John's: This is crazy.
[They argued that] the Israelis weren't the victims of the '48 war to
destroy the country. Ben-Gurion had real doubts about partition. Jordan
and Israel talked about dividing up the West Bank together. All those
things were heretical. They seemed to be coming from way, way out in left
field. Then we started reading [them], and it completely changed the way
we looked at these things." Mearsheimer says he had been blinded by Uris's
novel. "The New Historians' work was a great revelation to me. Not only do
they provide an abundance of evidence to back up their stories about how
Israel was really created, but their stories make perfect sense. There is
no way that waves of European Jews moving into a land filled with
Palestinians are going to create a Jewish state without breaking a lot of
Palestinian heads.... It's just not possible."
September 11 was a catalytic event for the realists. Mearsheimer and Walt
came to see the close US alliance with Israel as damaging American
relations with other states. American policy toward the Palestinians was
serving to foster terrorism, Walt wrote in a book called Taming American
Power. And you weren't allowed to discuss it. Walt spoke of the chilling
effect of the Israel lobby (on a University of California, Berkeley, TV
show called Conversations With History last fall): "Right now, this has
become a subject that you can barely talk about without people immediately
trying to silence you, immediately trying to discredit you in various
ways, such that no American politicians will touch this, which is quite
remarkable when you consider how much Americans argue about every other
controversial political issue. To me, this is a national security
priority for us, and we ought to be having an open debate on it, not one
where only one side is being heard from."
For his part, Mearsheimer saw the lobby's power in an episode in the
spring of 2002, when Bush called on Ariel Sharon to withdraw troops from
Palestinian towns on the West Bank. Sharon shrugged him off, and Bush
caved. Mearsheimer says by e-mail: "At the American Political Science
Association convention in the late summer of 2002, I was talking to a
friend about the US-Israel relationship. We shared similar views, and
agreed that lots of others thought the same way. I said to him over the
course of a dinner that I found it quite amazing that despite widespread
recognition of the lobby's influence, no one could write about it and get
it published in the United States. He told me that he thought that was not
the case, because he had a friend at The Atlantic who was looking for just
such an article."
The Atlantic had long hoped to assign a piece that would look
systematically at where Israel and America shared interests and where
those interests conflicted, so as to examine the lobby's impact. The
magazine duly commissioned an article in late 2002 by Mearsheimer and
Walt, whom Mearsheimer had brought in. "No way I would have done it
alone," Mearsheimer says. "You needed two people of significant stature
to withstand the firestorm that would invariably come with the publication
of the piece."
Mearsheimer and Walt had plenty of ideological company. After 9/11, many
other realists were questioning American policy in the Mideast. Stephen
Van Evera, an international relations professor at MIT, began writing
papers showing that the American failure to deal fairly with the
Israel/Palestine conflict was fostering support for Al Qaeda across the
Muslim world. Robert Pape, a professor down the hall from Mearsheimer at
Chicago, published a book, Dying to Win, showing that suicide bombers were
not religiously motivated but were acting pragmatically against occupiers.
The writer Anatol Lieven says he reluctantly took on the issue after 9/11
as a matter of "duty"--when the Carnegie Endowment, where he was a senior
associate, asked him to. "I knew bloody well it would bring horrible
unpopularity.... All my personal loyalties are the other way. I've
literally dozens of Jewish friends; I have no Palestinian friends."
Lieven says he was a regular at the Aspen Institute till he brought up the
issue. "I got kicked out of Aspen.... In early 2002 they held a
conference on relations with the Muslim world. For two days nobody
mentioned Israel. Finally, I said, 'Look, this is a Soviet-style debate.
Whatever you think about this issue, the entire Muslim world is shouting
about it.' I have never been asked back." In 2004 Lieven published a book,
America Right or Wrong, in which he argued that the United States had
subordinated its interests to a tiny militarized state, Israel. Attacked
as an anti-Semite, Lieven says he became a pariah among many colleagues at
the Carnegie Endowment, which he left for the fledgling New America
Foundation.
Yet another on this path was the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama, a
neoconservative-turned-realist. In 2004 he attended Charles Krauthammer's
speech at the American Enterprise Institute about spreading democracy and
was shocked by the many positive effects Krauthammer saw in the Iraq War.
Fukuyama attacked this militaristic thinking in an article in The National
Interest. He wrote with sympathy of the Palestinians and said the
neoconservatives confused American and Israeli interests. "Are we like
Israel, locked in a remorseless struggle with a large part of the Arab and
Muslim world, with few avenues open to us for dealing with them other than
an iron fist?... I believe that there are real problems in transposing
one situation to the other." Krauthammer responded in personal terms, all
but accusing Fukuyama of anti-Semitism. "The remarkable thing about the
debate was how oblique Frank's reference to the issue was and how batshit
Krauthammer and the other neoconservatives went," says Mike Desch. "It is
important to them to keep this a third rail in American politics. They
understood that even an elliptical reference would open the door, and they
immediately all jumped on Frank to make the point, 'Don't go there.'" It
seems to have worked. The soft-spoken Fukuyama left out the critique of
the neocon identification with Israel in his recent book, America at the
Crossroads.
"We understood there would be a significant price to pay," Mearsheimer
says. "We both went into this understanding full well that our chances of
ever being appointed to a high-level administrative position at a
university or policy-making position in Washington would be greatly
damaged." They turned their piece in to The Atlantic two years ago. The
magazine sought revisions, and they submitted a new draft in early 2005,
which was rejected. "[We] decided not to publish the article they wrote,"
managing editor Cullen Murphy wrote to me, adding that The Atlantic's
policy is not to discuss editorial decisions with people other than the
authors.
"I believe they got cold feet," Mearsheimer says. "They said they thought
the piece was a terrible--they thought the piece was terribly written.
That was their explanation. Beyond that I know nothing. I would be curious
to know what really happened." The writing as such can't have been the
issue for the magazine; editors are paid to rewrite pieces. The
understanding I got from a source close to the magazine is that The
Atlantic had wanted a piece of an analytical character. It got the
analysis, topped off with a strong argument.
That might have been the end of it. The authors "nosed around,"
Mearsheimer says, looking for another US publisher, then gave up,
concluding that the piece could not be published as an article or book in
"a mainstream outlet" in the United States. Half a year passed. Then a
scholar Mearsheimer will not identify called to say that a staffer at The
Atlantic had passed along the piece, which he found "magisterial." The
scholar put the authors in touch with Mary-Kay Wilmers, the London Review
of Books editor, and last fall she contracted to publish the piece.
"John, who I think is a little bit more hardheaded politically and
intellectually, expected what came," Desch says. "Steve was more
confident that facts and logic would carry the day, and from some
conversations I've had he was clearly shellshocked. He was in an exposed
position at Harvard." Desch adds that when the New York Sun linked the
authors to white supremacist David Duke, who praised the article, "it came
as a real kick in the stomach." Some measure of Walt's exposure is
financial. Bernard Steinberg, director of Harvard's Hillel center, brought
this issue up unprompted to me: "I talked to someone in Harvard
development and asked what the fallout had been, and he said, 'It's been
seismic.'"
Something in Mearsheimer's spirit would seem to be fulfilled in upsetting
people by expressing ideas that he deeply believes. "When you write about
this subject and you're critical of Israeli policy or critical of the
US-Israel relationship, you are invariably going to be called an
anti-Semite," he says. When I said he had autonomy as a professor to
enjoy "free discourse" in this country, he said, "What free discourse in
the United States? What free discourse are you talking about?"
Mearsheimer's friend Van Evera criticizes him for allowing his legitimate
anger over being shut out of the discourse to affect the tone of the
article. But Mearsheimer was expressing his sharp personality; and doesn't
passion give life to an argument?
The authors have gotten support from hundreds of e-mails, three-quarters
of which congratulate them, Mearsheimer says. Foreign-service officers in
Washington who are frightened by the neoconservative program are said to
be excitedly passing the article around. The European left has also
welcomed the paper, saying that these issues must be discussed. And even
in Israel the article has had a respectful reading, with a writer in
Ha'aretz saying it was a "wake-up call" to Americans about the
relationship.
Many liberals and leftists have signaled their discomfort with the paper.
Daniel Fleshler, a longtime board member of Americans for Peace Now, says
the issue of Jewish influence is "so incendiary and so complicated that I
don't know how anyone can talk about this in the public sphere. I know
that's a problem. But there's not enough space in any article you write to
do this in a way that doesn't cause more rancor. And so much of this
paper was glib and poorly researched." In Salon Michelle Goldberg wrote
that the authors had "blundered forth" into the argument in "clumsy and
crude" ways, for instance failing to distinguish between Jewish Likudniks
and Jewish support of Democrats in Congress. Noam Chomsky wrote that the
authors had ignored the structural forces in the American economy pushing
for war, what he calls "the tight state-corporate linkage." Norman
Finkelstein makes a similar distinction. "I'm glad they did it," he says
of the publication, but he argues that while the pro-Israel lobby controls
public debate on the issue, and even Congress, the lobby can't be shown to
decide the "elite opinion" that creates policy in the Mideast.
One problem with this argument is that in insisting on the primacy of
corporate decision-making, it diminishes the realm of political culture
and shows a real dullness about how ideas percolate in Washington. Think
tanks, the idea factories that help produce policy, used to have a firmly
WASPish character. But as Walt and Mearsheimer show, hawkishly pro-Israel
forces have established a "commanding presence" at such organizations
over much of the spectrum, from the Brookings Institution in the center to
the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation on the
right. After Bush's 2000 victory, Dick Cheney made sure that his
neoconservative friends were posted throughout the Administration, and
after 9/11 their militaristic ideas swept the government like a fever. In
a fearful time, their utter distrust of Arab and Muslim culture seemed to
the Bushies to explain the world. "You have an alliance between neocons
and aggressive nationalists that goes back thirty years. Their ideas have
bled into one another," says Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service. "And
neoconservatives put Israel at the absolute center of their worldview."
One of the tenets of neocon belief was that the road to peace in
Israel/Palestine led through Baghdad: Give Israel a greater sense of
security and you can solve the Palestinian issue later. That has been the
government policy.
Lieven says, "It's self-evidently true that other interests and ambitions
are involved in the war with Iraq.... Oil is very much--imperial
ambitions are very much there." But, he adds, "it is crazy to suggest on
the one hand that the neoconservatives had a great influence on the Bush
Administration and to say that it didn't play out in terms of a hard
interest for Israel. If you think the neocons were not running the whole
show but had a definite impact, then you can't possibly suggest that
Israeli interests were not involved."
The liberal intelligentsia have failed in their responsibility on
specifically this question. Because they maintain a nostalgic view of the
Establishment as a Christian stronghold in which pro-Israel Jews have
limited power, or because they like to make George Bush and the Christian
end-timers and the oilmen the only bad guys in a debacle, or because they
are afraid of pogroms resulting from talking about Jewish power, they have
peeled away from addressing the neocons' Israel-centered view of foreign
relations. "It seems that the American left is also claimed by the Israel
lobby," Wilmers, LRB's (Jewish) editor, says with dismay. Certainly the
old antiwar base of the Democratic Party has been fractured, with concerns
about Israel's security driving the wedge. In the 2004 primaries, Howard
Dean was forced to correct himself after--horrors--calling for a more
evenhanded policy in the Middle East. The New Yorker's courageous
opposition to the Vietnam War was replaced this time around by muted
support for the Iraq War. Tom Friedman spoke for many liberals when he
said on Slate that bombs in Israeli pizza parlors made him support
aggression in Iraq. Meantime, out of fear of Dershowitz, or respect for
him, the liberal/mainstream media have declined to look into the lobby's
powers, leaving it to two brave professors. The extensive quibbling on the
left over the Mearsheimer-Walt paper has often seemed defensive,
mistrustful of Americans' ability to listen to these ideas lest they cast
Israel aside.
Mearsheimer and Walt at times were simplistic and shrill. But it may have
required such rhetoric to break through the cinder block and get attention
for their ideas. Democracy depends on free exchange, and free exchange
means not always having to be careful. Lieven says we have seen in another
system the phenomenon of intellectuals strenuously denouncing an article
that could not even be published in their own country: the Soviet Union.
"If somebody like me, an absolute down-the-line centrist on this issue--my
position on Israel/Palestine is identical to that of the Blair
government--has so much difficulty publishing, it's a sign of how
extremely limited and ethically rotten the media debate is in this
country."
Realist ideas are resonating now because the utopian ideas that drove the
war are so frightening and demoralizing. Indeed, Fukuyama has moved toward
what he calls Wilsonian realism. Lieven is about to come out with a book
(co-edited with a right-winger from the Heritage Foundation) on ethical
realism. These ideas are appealing because they offer a better way of
explaining a dangerous world than the idea that our bombs are good bombs
and that Muslims only respect force. Left-wingers and liberals who find
themselves alienated from the country's warmongering leadership have to
acknowledge the potential in these ideas to forge a coalition of outs. But
the price of effecting such a realignment is high: It means separating
from the Israel lobby (or reforming it!) and trusting that a fairer
American policy in the Middle East will not mean abandoning Israel.
ny...@olm.blythe-systems.com
The Nation - May 15, 2006 issue
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20060515&s=weiss
Ferment Over 'The Israel Lobby'
by PHILIP WEISS
Given the paper's parentage, the ferment over it raises political questions.
How did these ideas get to center stage? And what do they suggest about the
character of the antiwar intelligentsia?
*
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